Clearly the coin flips at the beginning of sports fixtures need to be assessed by a panel of highly skilled judges who can pronounce on their validity. We'll also need local, regional, national, and international organizations to train, select, and maintain the quality of coin flipping judges and to maintain the integrity of the discipline while moving forward as new coins are minted and different sorts of flipping styles are proposed by. Membership of such organizations should be limited to those afilliated with the Ancient Order of Coin Flippers.
I think that's the point. It shows that people don't usually flip properly, leading to biased results.
It sounds like what they were intending to study is the actual variance that is introduced, on average, by imperfections in throws conducted by humans. Unless that's mistaken, it's a fair point to consider the n=48 here. Did they discover an average that can be generalized to humans or just to those 48?
Get a hundred thousand people to flip a coin once each and then see what happens!
Of all the stats we collect in sports, I wonder if someone has info on coin tosses in sports like American Football, Tennis, etc. I wonder if there are even rules regulating how a coin should be tossed in different sports...
Waiting for the HNer that likes electronics hacking to Show HN: My coin flipping robot I built over a weekend for consistent flips.
I assumed they did these coin flips were done using a machine. But I guess they wanted to test if human flippers because they wanted to make claims about the human coin flip phenomenon.
I think the result could be better described as "humans tend to flip fair coins to land on the side they started".
We need some minimum flippage for the toss to count.
The reason is because it was used as incentive:
> Intrigued? Join us and earn a co-authorship
Per the linked youtube video.
If you are doing self-experimentation, you do not.
48 "authors" is a bit extreme, but it's the norm to do some light human research with a half dozen authors as the subjects.
Doesn't look like the study author backgrounds are particularly focused on statistics. I would presume with 48 authors (all but 3 of which flipped coins for the study), the role of some might have been more test subject than author. And isn't being the subject in your own study going to introduce some bias? Surely if you're trying to prove to yourself that the coins land on one side or another given some factor, you will learn the technique to do it, especially if you are doing a low-rpm, low flip. Based on the study results, some of the flippers appear to have learned this quite well.
If the flippers (authors) had been convinced of the opposite (fair coins tend to land on the opposite side from which they started) and done the same study, I bet they could have collected data and written a paper with the results proving that outcome.